ProjectDetail

The first LULCL conference in October 2005 aimed at providing an overview of the state of the art in research on lesser used languages and intended to promote the networking among participants. The focus was on methodological issues such as:

strategies for an efficient support of lesser used languages

problems with theoretical approaches developed for major languages when applied to lesser used languages

the cultural, economical and political specificity of a user group for which computational resources are created

The second LULCL conference in November 2008 put a special focus on bringing together efforts from several related research communities, in order to join best practices, approaches and techniques and to add value to individual initiatives. In addition to lesser used languages, projects and initiatives concerned with other types of languages were presented, including:

minority languages

language varieties

sign languages

learner language

spoken language

All these types of languages pose similar issues for researchers, having to do with sparse resources, little standardisation, and challenges with automatic processing and building up of computational resources.

Conference topicsThe topics of interest for both LULCL meetings centered around the following themes:

Two scientific meetings on computational approaches for lesser used, lesser standardised and lesser resourced languages have been organized by the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism at the European Academy Bozen/Bolzano. Both meetings brought together international researchers and representatives of public authorities to discuss the latest advancements and needs concerning the computational support of lesser used languages. Proceedings of both meetings are available.